Seminar at the ESF
What is wrong with the current anti-trafficking politics?Thursday 4 May, 10.00-13.00 Room F27

Victims
of organized crime. Victims of male
violence. Sex-slaves. These are the terms commonly used to describe
migrant women in the EU’s sex industry. Trafficking, in
contrast to ‘voluntary’ migration such as
smuggling, is defined as an involuntary and non-consensual form of
migration geared towards exploitation of migrants’ labour
whether in sex or some other kind of industry. This conceptualization
of trafficking resulted in NGOs and states’ intervention
along two main lines: first, establishing of protective schemes for
victims of trafficking and second, the tightening of borders and visa
regimes to combat organized criminal networks.

This
seminar brings together migrant, feminist and sex workers’
rights activists to engage and
question such an understanding of trafficking. Rather than viewing
trafficking as a matter of organized crime, violence against women and
slavery, we propose to discuss trafficking from the perspective of
migration, labour and rights. We will address critically the ways in
which:
- the term ‘sexual slavery’ feeds into
moral panic,
hides the link between current transformations of labour relations and
restrains imposed upon migrants’ (labour) mobility
- the focus on organized crime hinders an understanding of
various
different actors and networks involved in organizing
migrants’ travel and labour. The idea of trafficking an
organized crime initiative also consigns women to the position of
victims and prevents our seeing them as labour migrants
- the existing border and visa regime reduce
women’s,
men’s and trans-people’s autonomous mobility and
result in trafficking and smuggling networks becoming an alternative to
legally sanctioned systems of migration
- the anti-trafficking policies lead to anti-prostitution
laws, subsume
all migrant sex workers under the category of victims and worsen
sex-workers’ working conditions and rights
- the category of trafficking damages both the
migrants’
rights movements and the sex workers’ movements since it
furthers the political isolation of migrants who work in the sex
industry both from the other workers of that industry, and from the
other migrants

Shifting
the terms of analysis of
trafficking from violence and organized crime to migration and labour
creates new political and interpretative possibilities. Analytically,
it provides us with a framework to examine the impact restrictive
immigration and labour policies on migrant workers lives and on sex
workers’ lives. Politically, it avoids the danger of the
collusion between feminist and states’ anti-immigration
agenda, which
occurs when victimhood is the main frame of reference, and it proposes
a political alliance centered on freedom of movement and resistance
against labour exploitations

Thursday
4 May18.00 - 20.00 Workshop on cartography in the Borders
- actions against the borders with an emphasis in the Meditareannean
and the South of
Europe (by Frassanito and Ya Basta!)
20.00
- 22.00 Assembly on migration and precarity -
european prespectives -
ways of thinking and acting on
those fields

Friday 5 May 16.00-20.00 Queer / Gender Isuues.
Sex Work moves...Let's talk practices of resistance in terms of sex workers
organising,
and in terms of interconnections - and conflicts - with other
movements, like the migrants movements and the feminist and the
lesbian, and the
queer... and the possibilities and the hopes... (by Next Genderation)
. Feminist perspective in the movement
networking
. Queer perspective (belgrade, israel,
greece)
. Constructed identities through
male\female (divided groups) experience
and patriarchy 21.00 Sexism inside the movement
(the conclusions of the above workshop,
will be unified in a common discussion)
23.00 Queer Party